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Awesome Firefox Developer Tools (for Web Designers)

Written by Artisan | May 26, 2015 12:01:47 PM
Firefox has many tools that make designing websites highly efficient. However, do you know about the Firefox Developer Tools? Firefox has awesome tools that further enhance the design process. Consider adding some of these tools to your design repertoire.

Firefox Developer Tools for Creating Webpages

One awesome tool is the style editor. It allows Web designers to create, edit and import style sheets with ease. The style editor has three main functional parts.

1. The Style Sheet Pane

The style sheet pane stores all style sheets of a webpage as a list. Quickly navigate through the list, and edit existing or new style sheets.

2. The Editor Pane

The editor pane is where you edit a selected style sheet and view its source information. The editor pane makes viewing CSS easier by using highlights and line numbers.

3. The Media Sidebar

The media sidebar shows the media rules for a webpage and provides links to the sheets where the rules are defined. The media sidebar is also compatible with responsive design view.

Other great tools for creating webpages are the shader editor and scratchpad. The shader editor allows Web designers to test both 2-D and 3-D graphics. The tool uses WebGL to edit fragment and vertex shaders. WebGL is a kind of JavaScript API that powers interactive 2-D and 3-D graphics. The shader editor shows the source of the shaders and allows you to edit them. Scratchpad is a good way to learn your way around JavaScript, which may come in handy. It allows for experimentation with JavaScript by showing you how your code interacts with a webpage by testing various outputs. Also, change large portions of code instead of editing line by line. The tool has plenty of keyboard and editor shortcuts.

Firefox Developer Tools for Debugging Webpages

Two awesome debugging tools from Firefox Developer are the page inspector and the Web console. The page inspector allows you to review and change any HTML or CSS of a webpage. You can also select and inspect webpage colors, view fonts, facilitate animations, test background images and work with the page inspector from the Web console. The Web console stores all information associated with a webpage, including CSS, JavaScript and any errors. The Web console allows you to interact with the webpage using JavaScript expressions. It has color-coded indicators for different errors. For example, a CSS error is blue, where as a JavaScript error is orange.
There are many other useful tools offered by Firefox Developer. For instance, 3-D view shows HTML in 3-D nested blocks that are color-coded. Firefox Developer is definitely a good option to consider.

To get more awesome design tips, or to expand your client base, get in touch with Artisan Talent today.